second class super combattants

[ywl]

Originally posted by apoger:
>Golem

Vulnerable to magic duel, so not too much of an issue.


>Harvester of Sorrow

We are going to see a lot of this bad boy.


>Fallen Angel
>Vampire Lord

Not quite as bad due to low hit points.

Harvester of Sorrow is fine as long as they don't have more slots. In dom 1, they have only the head, two-hands and two miscs. Their protection are low and thus they are in general manageable.

Vampire Lord might be dangerous with a Snake Poison Bladder, a Vine Shield and an heavy armor. But thier low hitpoint make them not too much different any undead generals. With their ability to generate Vampire, you'd rather want them staying home anyway.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by DominionsFAN:
Hey Cherry, I think he was talking about the abusable PRETENDER SCs! So you say that is it a good tactic to make a cheap pretender SC and massacre all indies and AIs without a problem?
This is a cheap abuse IMHO, and I agree with Stavros.
I am not a vet, but I've had this experience with the Dominions II. demo.

IF you will be able to make SCs later on, like golem, that is all cool, but this early game pretender SC abuse SUCKS.

Maybe so, but he posted in a thread about late-game summonable SCs, in which pretenders were never mentioned. And he never mentioned pretenders. What makes you think that's what he was talking about?

Originally posted by MStarvos:
Yes I CAN SEE THIS from the demo, since I have killed independents of str 9 with a pretender SC, also I have murderized most of the Impossible AIs in the early game with the pretender SC. I had this experience, I didnt made that post out of my ***.

That's fine, but that's not what the thread was about. Perhaps your post should have been more clear? Your original post did not in any way mention pretenders, and from the location, the implication was that you, personally, found that "second-class summonable supercombattants" were destroying the strategic portion of Dominions 2.

Anyway, I'm not going to pollute the thread anymore with a pointless argument. But keep in mind there's a difference between gratuitous humor and gratuitous criticism. If you're going to criticize, at least explain what you're criticizing, and then post it somewhere relevant - this thread is NOT about pretenders.

-Cherry

[Pocus]

Originally posted by ywl:
Vampire Lord might be dangerous with a Snake Poison Bladder, a Vine Shield and an heavy armor. But thier low hitpoint make them not too much different any undead generals. With their ability to generate Vampire, you'd rather want them staying home anyway.

sneaky and immortal though. So either used in raid into enemy territory, or as cheap kamikaze combattants if you are defending your home.

Nothing unbalanced anyway.

[Saber Cherry]

Have any of you used werewolves as SC's? The ones you get from call of the wild. Since they start with super-human stats, natural protection, regeneration, an extra attack, size 3, and stealthy, I always tried to use them as a chassis... I think the HP are just too low, though, since it never worked.

[ywl]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
Have any of you used werewolves as SC's? The ones you get from call of the wild. Since they start with super-human stats, natural protection, regeneration, an extra attack, size 3, and stealthy, I always tried to use them as a chassis... I think the HP are just too low, though, since it never worked.

I've never tried but they don't look promising.

You can easily put items on one to make him a capable combatant or good assasain. But you'll need some pretty expensive ones to make him qualified as "super" one. You gems are better spent on a spectral mage, or a even sleeper .

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
Have any of you used werewolves as SC's? The ones you get from call of the wild. Since they start with super-human stats, natural protection, regeneration, an extra attack, size 3, and stealthy, I always tried to use them as a chassis... I think the HP are just too low, though, since it never worked.

I used them as good assassins, with a black heart and a copper armor (I was fighting Caelum). It worked fairly well, and forced the player to bodyguard many of his mages.

And dont forget : you can loose 3 in a row, when you draw the jackpot, it win big time (the jackpot being a mage scripted for spells which are not useful in assassination attempts, and have items and gems for big battle spells).

[PvK]

Originally posted by Pocus:
...

My proposal would not be to tweak them down (because when not used as SC, they would perform even less efficiently), but renforce the mechanisms which lead to the demise of a strong isolated unit versus a hord of weaker units. This could fix some of the problem with combatting pretender too. Some quick examples:

- bypassing defence always incur one hit, even if prot is not passed.
- being attacked has a random chance of increasing your fatigue by one.

That would tone down the whole 'I start with a combat pretender and take the world with him' issue too.

I think Pocus' proposal is a very good one.

In general, it would help a lot if super-combattants needed some friends around to keep them from getting overwhelmed.

Such an added mechanic could also help to improve the usefulness of cheaper units.

Charging a little fatigue for a defense seems like a good one.

I wouldn't always inflict a point of damage for every hit, but some tweak to the chance of taking some damage even with high PROT would help.

It would also make sense if defense skill was reduced by the number of incoming attacks per turn - say a cumulative -2 to defense for each attack after the first.

PvK